With music influenced by both neo-Romantics and modernists, composer John McLeod was one of Britain's most popular and prolific composers since coming on the scene in the 1970s until his death in 2022. His output spanned most major genres except for opera, from orchestral music, including several concertos, to choral, chamber, and vocal scores, as well as music for film and theater.

McLeod was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on March 8, 1934, but moved to Edinburgh in 1970 and has spent the rest of his life there. He attended the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying clarinet with top-flight players: Gervase de Peyer, Jack Brymer, and Reginald Kell. He also studied conducting with Sir Adrian Boult. Despite all this, he switched his major to composition and took lessons with Lennox Berkeley and later with Witold Lutoslawski. The latter became a major influence on his style, especially in regard to improvisational procedures, but he also closely studied the works of Shostakovich and other composers following in the Romantic tradition.

Winning a Guinness Prize, McLeod began to make an impact in the early 1980s. He was named Associate Composer of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for a term from 1980 to 1982. In 1989, he was chosen as a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. In addition to the Philharmonia Orchestra, Halle Orchestra, and other British orchestras, McLeod's works were commissioned and performed by the Nashville Symphony in the U.S., the Orchestra of the Staatstheater, Saarbrücken, in Germany, and Poland's Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra of Krakow, which he conducted in a concert of his works. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra broadcast McLeod's works more than a dozen times, and the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland was also a major champion. Soloists who have played McLeod's works include percussionist Evelyn Glennie, whose performance of his Percussion Concerto was paired with a Scottish Chamber Orchestra reading of his orchestral piece Out of the Silence in 2018. That was just one of a large number of works McLeod wrote in the 21st century, continuing to compose at an age when most composers might be slowing. McLeod died on March 24, 2022, in Edinburgh. ~ James Manheim, Rovi